Another rule provided that members should seat themselves in the dining-hall in messes of four, the tables being of the exact length required to accommodate three messes each. This arrangement prevails to the present day. Shake-speare was familiar with these petty details. He laid one of the scenes of King Henry VI.' in the Temple garden itself, where we have, properly enough, a legal discussion on the rights of certain claimants to the throne. In the course of this discussion the following colloquy takes place: "Plantagenet. Great lords and gentlemen, what means this silence? Suffolk. Plan. Thanks, gentle sir; Come, let us four to dinner." — ii. 4. Edward J. Castle, Esq., of London, a member of the Queen's Council and a life-long resident in the Temple, comments on the above passage as follows: "This reference to the Temple Gardens, not saying whether the Inner or the Middle Temple is meant, curiously enough points to the writer being a member of Gray's Inn; . . an Inner or a Middle Temple man would have given his Inn its proper title." Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene; a Study, 65, n. Gray's Inn garden had not been laid out when the play of 'King Henry VI.' was written. Coincidence number nine. X At one time Bacon thought himself in serious danger of his life. The popular feeling against him grew out of his connection with the Earl of Essex, although Mr. Spedding has been able to show beyond a doubt that it was wholly misdirected and unjust. The fact of its existence, however, cannot be questioned. Bacon frequently referred to it in his correspondence during the period 1599-1601. "My life has been threatened and my name libeled." Letter to the Queen. "As for any violence to be offered me, wherewith my friends tell me I am offered, I thank God I have the privy coat of a good conscience. I know no remedy against libels and lies.”— Letter to Cecil. "For my part, I have deserved better than to have my name objected to envy, or my life to a ruffian's violence."- Letter to Howard. The Shake-speare Sonnets were written in the latter part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. From some unexplained cause the author of these productions seems also to have been at that time in danger of his life. "Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now, Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, "The coward conquest of a wretch's knife.”. Sonnet 74. "Your love and pity doth the impression fill, For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o'ergreen my bad, my good allow? To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices, that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are, Mark how with my neglect I do dispense."- Sonnet 112. On this point we quote from Mr. Thomas Tyler's 'Shakespeare's Sonnets,' as follows: "In the series of Sonnets 100 to 126, there are allusions to some scandal which, at the time when these sonnets were written, was in circulation with regard to Shakespeare. . . . How deeply Shakespeare felt the scandal is shown by the first two lines of 112, where he speaks of his forehead as though branded or stamped thereby : "Your love and pity doth the impression fill, Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow.' "The great difficulty in the way of supposing that the reference is merely to the stage and acting is presented by the remarkable language of Sonnet 121, from which it appears that the scandal had some relation to Shakespeare's moral character: ""T is better to be vile than vile esteem'd, When not to be receives reproach of being.' "The poem consisting of Sonnets 100 to 126, which speaks of the scandal from which the poet was suffering, we have placed in the spring or early summer of 1601." Page 113. The Earl of Essex was executed in February, 1601, at which time, or immediately afterward, the scandal against Bacon reached its height. It appears, then, 1. That each of these two authors (if there were two) had a "dark period" in his life; 2. That this dark period arose in each from the same cause, a public scandal; 3. That it culminated in each at precisely the same time, "in the spring or summer of 1601;" and 4. That it inspired in both cases fears of assassination. Coincidence number ten. ΧΙ The antithesis between nature and art was a conspicuous dogma of the peripatetic school of philosophy. In the contention of Aristotle the distinction between nature and art is sufficiently expressed when we say that a formative principle is at work inherently in one, while in the other the source of energy is without. Bacon declared that no antithesis whatever exists between the two cases; that the processes are identical, except in one particular, namely: man has power by bringing natural objects together to institute new processes, or by separating natural objects to destroy old processes, the processes themselves, however, being always strictly in accordance with natural law. The difference, according to Bacon, resolves itself into a power of motion. For instance, the sun shining through drops of water falling from a cloud creates a rainbow; so, also, when it shines through the spray of a fountain. Nature does the work in her own way in both cases. Given a shower of rain or mist, whether natural or artificial, in sunlight, and the rainbow comes as a matter of course. Gold is refined by one method, and by one only, whether in the hot sands of the earth or in a furnace prepared by art. In the grafting of a tree, man may insert a scion in the stock, but the new fruit is developed under the same laws that govern the production of the old. This view was then a new one and without doubt original with Bacon; but it was also formulated by Shake-speare, and in the same language, almost word for word, as the following parallelism will show: A gentler scion to the wildest stock; putting natural bodies together or 1 ἡ γὰρ τέχνη ἀρχὴ καὶ εἶδος τοῦ γενομένου, ἀλλ' ἐν ἑτέρῳ, ἡ δὲ τῆς φύσεως κίνησις ἐν αὐτῷ, ἀφ' ἑτέρας οὖσα φύσεως τῆς ἐχούσης τὸ εἶδος ἐνεργεία. Aristotle De Gen.-Anim. — ii. 1. And make conceive a bark of baser separating them, - the rest is done The doctrine appeared for the first time in Bacon's prose works, as above, in 1612; in the plays, in 1611. It appears, then, that the two authors made the same recondite study of the relations between nature and art, made it at the same time, and reached the same conclusion. Coincidence number eleven. XII That the author of the Plays had resided in France in early life, and under circumstances that gave him unusual access to some of the political records of the country, seems to be indicated in the Plays themselves. In 'King Henry VI.,' Part 1, we have a most extraordinary scene in which the famous Joan of Arc and the Duke of Burgundy are the principal characters. The Duke is an ally of the English. He is marching at the head of his troops toward Paris, while the French King, also at the head of his troops and accompanied by the Maid, appears on the field in the distance. A herald demands a parley, and then the following dialogue ensues: "King. A parley with the Duke of Burgundy! Bur. King. Bur. Who craves a parley with the Burgundy? The princely Charles of France, thy countryman. Bur. Joan. Look on thy country, look on fertile France, And see the cities and the towns defaced |